Prof. P. Gardner

M., J. L.

doi:10.1038/140267b0

Obituary
Published: 14 August 1937

Prof. P. Gardner

J. L. M.

Nature volume 140, pages 267–268 (1937)Cite this article

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Abstract

PBOF. PERCY GARDNER was born on November 24, 1846, and passed away on July 19 last, after a few days illness, interested almost to the last in ideas, persons and things, and above all, in his friends. He was educated at the City of London School, and after a year's experience of business went to Christ's College, Cambridge, where he graduated with first-class honours in the Classical and in the Moral Sciences Tripos, and was elected a fellow in 1872. He had already entered the British Museum, and under great chiefs, Lane Poole and Barclay Head, spent fifteen years in a remarkable combination of metrological and aesthetic studies which determined his outlook on antiquity, while it earned him European repute. In 1877 he visited Greece, at a stirring time; Mycenae and Olympia had been excavated; there was talk of work at Pergamon, and even around the Acropolis of Athens. In 1880 he was appointed Disney professor of archaeology at Cambridge, concurrently with his museum work; and it was with this double experience that he entered on his professorship of classical art and archaeology at Oxford in 1887. Since 1880, too, he had been one of the original editors of the Journal of Hellenic Studies, and responsible for the high standard of scholarship and wide scope at which it aimed.